All posts by scollins

Ever wondered what it’s like to live and travel on your boat for four years? Or how to write a book and find a publisher? Cyndi Perkins has done both. The award-winning journalist, a former Daily Mining Gazette managing editor, talks about her novel inspiration (and yours) at a chat and book-signing for More Than You Think Yoo Know (Beating Windward Press). Refreshments served.

Thursday, October 19 at 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm;

Van Pelt and Opie Library, East Reading Room

You can find Cyndi’s book on Amazon, and more about her adventures and work on her website.

“Daughter of the Lake,” a documentary film about the human and environmental costs of gold mining and indigenous resistance in the Peruvian Andes, will be screened at 7 p.m. tonight (Sept. 20) in Fisher 135.

The director of this documentary, Ernesto Cabellos, will join for a Skype discussion from Lima, Peru, after the screening. A representative from the Menominee tribe in Michigan will also join in the panel discussion. Read the full Tech Today story.

CCM major Cyndi Perkins has published her novel, More Than You Think You Know (Beating Windward Press). More Than You Think You Know is a women’s road (river) trip novel about ships and friendships, crashes and hot flashes. Released in July 2017, the story follows Hailey, Robin and Trish, three women piloting the 44-foot luxury trawler Blackout through the Heartland Rivers from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. Stayed tuned for Cyndi’s reading in Van Pelt on Oct. 19.

Cyndi has sailed Lake Superior, the Heartland Rivers, and the Eastern Seaboard since 1995. She and her husband survived two 6,000-mile circumnavigations of America’s Great Loop aboard their 32-foot DownEast sailing vessel Chip Ahoy. Cyndi writes and edits for Michigan Technological University digital and print publications. But did you know that she is also an award-winning journalist who worked for 10 years at the Daily Mining Gazette and who wrote the popular “Line of Sight” column? Her nautical writing credits include Cruising World, Latitudes & Attitudes, Good Old Boat, PassageMaker, Southwinds, and Northern Breezes magazines.

You can find Cyndi’s book on Amazon, and more about her adventures and work on her website.

Speaking Your User’s Language, an interactive workshop focusing on the benefits and challenges of communicating directly and authentically with your audience, will be presented by Nick Rosencrans, User Experience Analyst at the University of Minnesota, and self-described champion for the end user.

The workshop is on Tuesday, September 19, 9:30-11 in Walker 120A.

Participants will identify issues of voice and tone in their communications, consider the consequences of prioritizing specific users or audiences over others, and share their experiences with other participants.

Finlandia University Campus Read 2017 Presents James Livingston and “No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea” 7PMWed Sept 20 Finnish American Heritage Center

Dr. Livingston’s most recent book, No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, challenges the long held imperative for reaching full employment levels. Amazon.com summarizes the book’s theme as such:

For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance–in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.

In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem–why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world–and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

Her best-selling book, Girl in the Woods, has been called “a powerful read” by Oprah Mazazine. The New York Times named Matis “a hero” and Lena Dunham of Girls called her book “Beautiful and so wildly engaging.” The book made The Guardian’s annual top 50 list.

Matis was raped on just her second night at college. Depressed and shocked that her school didn’t believe and protect her and discouraged by her otherwise loving and supportive parents from speaking of the attack, she dropped out of school. Matis then sought healing in the wild, on the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail leading from Mexico to Canada.

Girl in the Woods chronicles her five-month trek including encounters with rattlesnakes, bears and fellow pilgrims. More about Matis, her book and life is available online. A book signing will be held after the event. f you have any questions about this event, contact Beth Lunde-Stockero, Title IX Coordinator, at titleix@mtu.edu.

Michigan Tech will celebrate Women’s History Month with a visit from an internationally-known teacher, lecturer and diversity trainer The address by National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence winner Jane Elliott is the final event in the Social Justice Lecture Series. She will speak at 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 22 in Fisher Hall 135.

Elliot gained national prominence with her “Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes Experiment” where her blue-eyed students were treated better than brown-eyed students. She first conducted the famous exercise for her class the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Elliott’s exercise was filmed the third time she held it with her 1970 third-graders to become “The Eye of the Storm.”This in turn inspired a retrospective that reunited the 1970 class members with their teacher fifteen years later in A Class Divided.

Elliott will have copies of her book “A Collar In My Pocket” for purchase at her lecture, and will then be available to sign them after the talk.

The next offering in the Green Film Series is “Last Call at the Oasis,” a World Water Day film. The film will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday (March 23) in the Michigan Tech Forestry Building’s Hesterberg Hall (G002).

The 2012 documentary on the world’s water crisis sheds light on the vital role water plays in our lives, exposes the defects in the current system, shows communites already struggling with its ill effects and introduces us to individuals who are championing revolutonary solutons.